Insight Break the cycle and raise your children with love

My heart breaks for Africa’s children; how could we lose so many young lives emjay’vweni?

This is not a time to point fingers and blame each other; it is a time to reflect and provide solutions. It could have been any one of us.

Some say teenagers are out of hand and don’t listen, others say parents are complacent and don’t play their role, yet others say the taverns and clubs should not be serving young people.

We must reflect on what has happened and take stock.

We must remember that children, once born, must be nursed, taken care of, loved and nurtured.

They must be listened to, all their emotional needs must be met for them to grow up into healthy and happy adults.

I want us to talk about the fact that we are suddenly surprised and appalled by the disobedience of teenagers when their very foundation is shaky.

Our teenagers are wounded and traumatised, they are hurt by people who were supposed to love and raise them but didn’t, they are acting out their trauma and frustration by disregarding authority figures (parents, teachers, police and the list goes on) the source of the disobedience is unmet emotional needs.

I urge parents to focus hard on the early years of their children’s lives by being fully present and raising them with patience, love, dedication and prayer.

I also want to sympathise with parents, who don’t know any better, who were also raised by harsh parents under very difficult circumstances.

I acknowledge that parents are sometimes so deep in their own trauma that they don’t see the damage they are causing when they raise their own children.

I don’t want parents to feel attacked.

Sometimes it is too late to do anything but parents need to forgive themselves when they come to learn how they have missed the mark.

And children of those parents need to extend forgiveness to their parents for the damage caused and spend time healing so that they don’t pass the damage on to their children.

What we find is that, many wounded parents are raising children and passing on their wounds to their children who will pass it on to their children.

If nothing changes in how we raise our children, we are going to suffer for it and they will suffer or die from it.

This is just a call to all parents to raise their children with love, care and attention. Children want to be loved:

● It’s not right for us to give birth to children and leave them for others to raise, that harms them;

● It is wrong for us to never want to spend time with our children, even if their subject of interest is not of interest to you; if we are not interested in them, they grow up believing that they are not worthy of being listened to by anyone, their confidence is affected;

● It is not right for us to confine childcare to buying things for them, clothes, food, and school uniforms. That’s part of it, not all of it.

Childcare includes understanding your child’s emotions and finding out why they are sad when they are sad without shouting at them and commanding them to be happy despite the fact that they are visibly sad.

This makes them think that their emotions don’t matter and later learn to self-sabotage; and

● It’s not right to pretend to be single with no dependents when you are a parent and should always seek to make decisions that are in the best interest of your children (first) and then you.

That’s what it means to be a parent, to make decisions that are always in the best interest of our children, otherwise they will think they don’t matter and that no-one cares.

We must acknowledge then, that, through no doing of our own, we are a wounded people.

We have endured some of the worst atrocities to ever happen to human beings, we have been abandoned by those who were supposed to keep us safe, we were left to fend for ourselves at ages when we should have been worrying only about play, we have been isolated, shamed, abused, oppressed to mentioned just a few examples of what happened to us.

Because no-one should ever go through these injustices; we developed coping mechanisms that were unhealthy and made us believe we were in danger, or unlovable, or that people were never to be trusted.

We formed these core beliefs and we subsequently show up in the world assuming the

If nothing changes in how we raise our children, we are going to suffer for it and they will suffer or die from it

worst because we’ve only been exposed to the worst of humanity, so much so, we don’t see kindness for what it is, we always think there is a hidden agenda, when there is none.

We are constantly in fight or flight mode, unsafe in the world.

Our actions match what we are feeling inside and because we feel unsafe, we start protecting ourselves by being rude to other people, accusing them, guilt-tripping them, isolating them, disregarding them, offending them and generally being defensive about our shortcomings.

We become spiteful and conniving and make it difficult for others to live harmoniously with us.

It takes another brave human being to lovingly bring to your attention these blind spots so that they can be worked on.

We can begin to improve things by just raising our children well and we will stand to benefit from the adults they become.